[Withdrawn] July Entry: Spire of Bone

[Gidde]

Very cool, Immolate

[tilt]

great idea... and VERY nice border... must agree with Jax though - teeth inwards on those skulls... don't know how many times I've told my minions that.. don't look to the sky - your necks are wide open for those pesky adventurers

[mmmmmpig]

rotate the skulls (like everyone else said) and you have yourself a border

[Immolate]

Lol you guys are relentless!

Skulls duely reversed to ward off pitchforks and torches.



Oh, PS, not as easy to do as you might have thought as the three parts long since ceased being separate, so I had to "extract" the skull, rotate it and then increase it in size by 10% to handle the gappage.

[mmmmmpig]

When is stuff in PS easy? Looks better

[Jaxilon]

yeppers, it's much scarier. Now if you wish to peer into the map you create one must put their head & neck through the teeth of dead skulls.....it's just freaky. Before they were more like sliding it through a few bowling balls

[Crayons]

Now this is interesting! Do you always start by doing the border?
I'm looking forward to the meat on the plate! On or off the the bone!

[Immolate]

If there is one thing consistent about my style it is that I'm not very consistent. I tend to start with the part of the piece that inspires me. When nothing inspires me, I start with that. In this case it was a textbook picture of a skull, complete with lower jaw and lots of lines and labels. There isn't much of the old picture in the final product but the lines and proportions are what caught my eye. So I started with that, removed the jaw, beat it to death with filters and threshold layers and image adjustments until I got the effect I wanted, then "overpainted" it (it being the skull, arm and spine) to give it some natural flow. Overpainting requires that you don't mask the border, just hand paint the thing. The countless tiny errors you introduce make the finished product much more appealing, even if it does take a long time to do. About five or six hours in this case. Don't ask how I got the particular effect on the bone... I couldn't possibly reproduce it. Then I just hit it with some basic colors and was satisfied.

I don't think I've ever started with the border before, though I have started with general layout, as in my "Rogue" magazine ad.

[tilt]

looks much cooler now.. I believe my necromancer might just commision the local silversmith for working that into a mirror

I believe Coyotemax has a habbit of beginning with the border - to set the mood for the map. But I like to begin with the map, to set the mood for the border

[ravells]

Ohhhh shudder!!!! Scary stuff and great border!